Juan Carlos Fomperosa García planned to celebrate his son’s
17th birthday on Thursday. But first, he had to go in for a meeting around 9am
with immigration officials in Phoenix, Arizona, for what he believed was to
discuss his request for asylum.
“He walked in. An hour later, they brought me a bag with his
stuff and that was it,” said Yennifer Sanchez, Fomperosa García’s 23-year-old
daughter.
The single father of three US citizens, who entered the
country 20 years ago, was detained after meeting with Immigration and Customs
Enforcement officials, but never came out, his daughter said, adding that she
thought he was safe because he had a work permit.
By Friday morning, Fomperosa García had called his children
to let them know he had been deported to Mexico.
Now, Sanchez has become the sole guardian of her 17-year-old
brother and 14-year-old sister. She said she plans to continue working as a
caregiver and, with the “moral support” of her father, care for her siblings.
“They are going to keep going to school,” Sanchez said of
her siblings. “I’m going to work. We’re going to try to get through this.”
To help the family financially, a local organization started
fundraising money online. They raised more than $1,300 in less than three
hours.
Ayensa Millan, a Phoenix-based immigration attorney who was
contacted by Fomperosa García’s family on Thursday, said she wasn’t sure why
Fomperosa García had the check-in with Ice officials. She said his asylum
request had already been denied “so there was no reason for them to interview
him for an asylum claim”.
“It sounds to me like they literally just called him to
remove him because of his prior removal order,” Millan said.
In a statement, Ice confirmed Fomperosa García had been
deported and that he had been “previously repatriated to Mexico three times,
including a formal deportation in 2014”. Last year, he was again ordered
removed by an immigration judge and in 2015 was convicted of a federal
misdemeanour charge, according to Ice.
“Ice will continue to focus on identifying and removing
individuals with criminal convictions who have final orders of removal issued
by the nation’s immigration courts,” the statement said.
Fomperosa García’s deportation comes a few weeks after the
deportation of Guadalupe García de Rayos, a mother of two US citizens who lived
in Arizona for more than two decades. She was also deported after she went in
for a check-in with Ice.
But under a new executive order that Donald Trump signed on
25 January, García de Rayos became a priority for deportation. The order states
that undocumented immigrants should be deported if they have been charged with
any criminal offense. The president said the order was needed “to ensure the
public safety of the American people”.
Millan said her advice to undocumented immigrants,
especially those with no serious criminal records, is “to not be fearful and to
pay close attention to what’s going on”. She noted that most undocumented
immigrants who’ve been deported recently had prior orders of removal or had
already been found by an immigration judge to not have strong enough merits to
be granted a stay in the US.
For undocumented immigrants who’ve become a priority for deportation
under Trump’s new executive order and have pending check-ins with Ice, Millan
said she advises them to be prepared and get an immigration attorney. Another
option is to seek sanctuary at a church.
“I always leave it up my clients’ discretion and tell them
these are the immigration consequences,” Millan said. “I tell them, ‘If you are
going to stay there and go for the long haul, by all means, do it.’ But it’s up
to them because, when people go into sanctuary places, you never know how long
they’re going to be there.”
With tears in her eyes, Sanchez said on Friday that her
father was nothing like the type of people Trump alludes to when he talks about
deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records.
“When you image people breaking the law, you imagine a scary
person,” she said. “You imagine someone who doesn’t care for anyone else. When
I hear those words being said about my dad and seeing what type of person he
is, it hurts. Criminal would never be a way that I would describe my father.”
Instead, Sanchez said she would use words like “goofball”
and “caring” to describe her father, adding that he liked to watch movies,
listen to zumba music, dance and make people laugh.
“I know that if he was sitting right here right now, he
would be making everyone crack up,” she said
0 Comments